Eating across China: hotpot, the eight cuisines and what to order in each city you visit

China does not have a national cuisine so much as a dozen regional ones that happen to share chopsticks. A visitor moving from Shanghai to Beijing to Xi’an eats three different countries’ worth of food in a week, and the one mistake first-timers make is ordering the same things in each city. This guide maps the cuisines to the places on our routes, with the dishes to order in each, and a section on hotpot, which is the meal Australians most want to try and least know how to.

The map, in brief

Chinese cooks talk about eight great cuisines; a visitor needs five regions:

Shanghai has excellent restaurants from every region, so you can taste the whole map there, as the Shanghai food guide notes; but each cuisine is best in its own city, and a guide ordering in the local dialect is best of all.

Hotpot: how it works

Hotpot (huoguo) is a pot of simmering broth set into the table, into which you cook thin-sliced meat, seafood, vegetables, tofu and noodles yourself, a few pieces at a time, then dip them in a sauce you mixed. It is the most sociable meal in China and the one visitors return to.

• Choose the broth. Sichuan-style is red, oily, fiercely spiced with chilli and numbing Sichuan pepper; the split pot (yuanyang) has a red half and a mild half, which is what tables with children or first-timers order. Beijing hotpot is a clear broth in a brass pot with a chimney, for lamb. Cantonese and Hainan styles are mild, for seafood and chicken.
• Choose the dippers, from a menu or a tablet: sliced lamb or beef, meatballs, fish, prawns, tofu skin, mushrooms, greens, lotus root, potato, noodles. Order modestly and add; the table fills fast.
• Mix the sauce at the sauce bar: sesame paste, chilli oil, garlic, coriander, spring onion, soy, vinegar, oyster sauce; a Beijing sauce is sesame-based, a Sichuan one is garlic and oil.
• Cook in seconds. Thin meat takes ten; leaf vegetables thirty; potatoes and lotus root minutes. Use the cooking chopsticks, not your eating ones, in the pot.
• Pace. A hotpot dinner is two hours; the broth gets stronger as it reduces; the noodles go in last.

The big chains (Haidilao, with its famous service, free manicures and noodle dancers, is the one every visitor hears about) are consistent and child-friendly; neighbourhood hotpot restaurants are cheaper and better. Dress for it: the oil mist clings to clothes.

City by city

Shanghai, Suzhou, Hangzhou: the sweet soy of hongshao rou, the dumplings, river fish and shrimp, bamboo shoots in spring, hairy crab in autumn, Hangzhou’s tea-fed dishes and Suzhou’s noodle broths. Gentle, refined, the easiest introduction. The Shanghai, Suzhou and Hangzhou guides have the restaurants.

Beijing: Peking duck, carved at the table and wrapped in pancakes with cucumber and sweet bean sauce; boiled jiaozi by the plate; zhajiang noodles with fermented bean paste; the brass-pot lamb hotpot in winter; and the imperial-style dishes at the old restaurants. Breakfast is jianbing, douzhi (fermented mung-bean milk, an acquired taste) and fried dough. Heartier, saltier, wheat everywhere; the Beijing itinerary has the duck advice.

Xi’an: the Muslim Quarter’s lamb, cumin, flatbread and hand-pulled noodles, the pomegranate juice and the persimmon cakes, and the biangbiang noodle whose character has 58 strokes. The most different food on any of our routes and the one guests talk about; the Xi’an guide lists the dishes.

Guangzhou, Hong Kong: dim sum in the morning tea houses, roast meats hanging in windows, steamed whole fish, congee at midnight, the sweet soups. The cuisine Australians think they know and discover they do not; the Guangzhou guide is the tour.

Chengdu: hotpot, mapo tofu, twice-cooked pork, kung pao chicken as it should be, dan dan noodles, rabbit heads for the brave, and the teahouse snacks. Hot, numbing and layered; the far destinations guide explains why food people go.

Sichuan versus Hunan: which heat

Sichuan heat is ma la: numbing from Sichuan peppercorn, hot from dried chilli, in oil, with a tingling that lasts. Hunan heat is xiang la: fresh and pickled chillies, dry, sharp, smoky, without the numbing. Both appear on Shanghai and Beijing menus as “spicy”; if you like Thai heat, start with Hunan; if you like the tingle, Sichuan. “Wei la” (slightly spicy) is the phrase that keeps a dish edible for most Australians, and a guide says it in one word.

Breakfast by city

Shanghai: shengjianbao and soy milk. Beijing: jianbing and douzhi. Xi’an: paomo or a flatbread with lamb. Guangzhou: dim sum, properly, for an hour. Chengdu: noodles with chilli at seven in the morning. Hangzhou and Suzhou: noodles in clear broth. Every one of them is eaten standing or at a plastic table for a dollar or two, and every one is better than the hotel buffet, as the parks guide suggests for the morning after the park.

Try once, come back for

Try once: stinky tofu (Hunan and Shaoxing), douzhi in Beijing, century egg, sea cucumber at a banquet, hairy crab with the tools, the rabbit heads in Chengdu, a baijiu toast.

Come back for: xiaolongbao, Peking duck, Xi’an’s roujiamo, Cantonese roast goose, mapo tofu, a split-pot hotpot, and the scallion oil noodles that every Shanghainese abroad dreams about.

Allergies, vegetarians, children

The Shanghai food guide covers the card in Chinese for allergies, the stock question for vegetarians, halal restaurants (which are superb in Xi’an and good everywhere) and what children eat. Hotpot is the easiest meal for a mixed table of needs: the mild half of the pot, vegetables and tofu for the vegetarian, and each person cooks their own.

With a guide

On our tours the guide chooses one meal a day by region and tells the kitchen what the table can and cannot eat; the hotpot night is usually the second evening in Shanghai and the one guests photograph most. The day guide bookings can be built around food alone: a market, a class (the experiences guide), a tea house and a hotpot, which for some guests is the whole point of China.